Blog: Jill Dyche

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January 26, 2008

Bored With CRM? The Mojito's On Me!

In which Jill and some friends debate the value of CRM, and the only winner is the bartender.

Responses to an informal CRM survey,… Okay, wait a minute.

See, it wasn’t actually a scientific survey. It was more like a, um, poll. A poll done by me. At a pub called Paddy O’s. (Get it? There’s a PATIO there, which is part of the problem.) And the focus group was a bunch of product managers and data analysts from the Marketing department of a large automobile manufacturer. And if this wasn’t enough of an intoxicating cocktail, we were drinking Captain Morgan’s and pineapple juice. ‘Nuff said.

Anyway, we all knew a fair bit about CRM and a bunch of us were users of a major enterprise software vendor’s CRM tool, and some of us were using the data to assemble targeted customer lists, and a handful of us had been featured in a magazine as a CRM case study, and one of us had actually written a book on CRM, so we were sitting around talking about CRM and somebody actually said, “Is this boring?” Then everyone said, “Yeah" and we ordered a round of Mojitos.

Then we realized that we weren’t really discussing CRM at all. We had been talking about the vendors, the market consolidation, whether one tool’s marketing automation capabilities surpassed another’s, whether you can really do targeted marketing without data mining (me: “Nope. No way. Uh, can I have another Cuba Libré please?”), and what the move the market leader would make next. Utterly boring stuff.

Someone ordered a Caipirinha with lime and said, “Okay, but is CRM changing the customer’s perception of our company?” and an argument ensued over whether the automaker had truly leveraged the newfound customer knowledge it had gleaned from its CRM program. Were the customers logging on to the web site? Were they getting better service? Were the dealers on board? What was the impact on supplier relationships? People weighed in on their perceptions of CRM’s value, not as a packaged application or even as an infrastructure, but more as a corporate-wide program that was (or wasn’t, depending on who was talking) delivering quantifiable and sustained business value.

Now THAT was an interesting conversation. In fact, it’s one we should probably all be having, plus or minus the Mojitos.

Technorati tag: CRM, customer relationship management, marketing automation, target marketing

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January 20, 2008

Hey IT! Get Your Mojo!

In which Jill advocates a little Mojo with her 4 o'clock grande percent white mocha. With extra foam on both counts.

I’ve often argued that the motivation and efforts of an IT organization should be transcendental: they must exceed the narrow limits of incumbent technologies and established architectural frameworks. Such efforts shouldn’t only be rational, they should be visionary. Sometimes, this means IT has to take the reigns.

So, now that we’ve gotten the hypothesis out of the way, let me take a moment to turn you on to Mojo Nixon, he of I Gotta Crazy Wife, That Someone Just Ain’t You, and When Did I Become a Dad? fame. This isn’t necessarily music I’d play loud if people are actually within earshot of my cubicle, but Mojo is about as good as a grande latte when the 4 o’clock hypoglycemia kicks in.

The point here is that new ideas can come from some unlikely places. As I wrote in a prior blog, everyone underestimates the visionary capabilities of the IT organization. IT can provide lines of business, executives, board members, and shareholders with original ideas and fresh thinking—a possibility rarely acknowledged by those outside of IT, who don’t engage often enough.

Okay, you’re thinking: When has IT ever provided the business with guidance? Aren’t they just a service, after all?

Inventory management and sell-through in retail. Customer profitability models. Fraud detection. Real-time product recommendations to purchase circles. Heck, the whole ERP thing, and the impact of the customer on the supply chain. They’re just not feasible without IT, and in most cases IT had to educate the business about their long-term value.

In short—and with a tip of the hat to Mojo Nixon—IT should be innovative, surprising, and consistently fun. Shouldn’t we all?

Technorati tag: business IT alignment, IT innovation, CRM, Mojo Nixon

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January 7, 2008

In BI, Strategy Is Destiny. (Or Should Be.)

In which Jill, with a nod of the head to operational reporting and BPM, reminds BI users and practitioners not to forget about where their companies are headed.

In his book Corporate Lifecycles, author Ichak Adizes maintains that all too often companies allow their current structures to determine their strategies. Sounds counterintuitive, right? But what can’t your company do because of weak IT investment, anemic management commitment, and flawed incumbent technologies?

My clients usually know what the answer to this question isn’t. It isn’t timely delivery of BI reports, speedy data loading, or changed data capture. But what about real-time individualization of customers, support of customer do-not-solicit requests, or customer and product hierarchy management? Is your Do Not Call list all that it can be? (Check out www.catalogchoice.org for shades of things to come.) Is your customer support tiered, fast, and relevant? Do you know who’s profitable within and outside of a household? What about the ideal product mixes for an existing customer segment?

You see where I’m going. In our rush to proselytize our existing capabilities, we forget what’s in the business’ pipeline. Most of this has to do with the lack of sustained and regular business requirements gathering.

But it also has to do with the business’ failure to think big. After all, you’ve reengineered your supply chain and you now have query access into your ERP system. And your CRM project is finished, right? (The answer should be no, Mr. Rest-on-Your Laurels Marketing Fatcat.) Irrespective of your industry or market segment, your customers are very likely taking you for granted, and their likelihood to attrite is—as 2002’s popular colloquialism put it—only a mouse click away.

In our rush to admonish companies that IT should be collaborating with the business to apply automation to business goals, ultimately enabling strategy, we overestimate the business side, and underestimate IT. We have lots of clients at which IT makes the initial plea for expertise, support, or executive guidance, ultimately educating the business side about what they didn’t know they didn’t know. A company’s strategy—indeed its very differentiation—may well hang in the balance.

Technorati tags: Corporate Lifecycles, CRM, corporate strategy, BI strategy, strategic BI, CRM strategy

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